Telework in public organizations: A systematic review and research agenda

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Valentina Mele,Paolo Belardinelli,Nicola Bellé
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13734

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Telework in public organizations: A systematic review and

research agenda

Valentina Mele

1

| Paolo Belardinelli

2

| Nicola Bellé

3

1

Department of Social and Political Sciences,

Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

2

O’Neill School of Public and Environmental

Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington,

Indiana, USA

3

Management and Health Laboratory, Institute

of Management, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna,

Pisa, Italy

Correspondence

Paolo Belardinelli, O’Neill School of Public and

Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, 1315 E

10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.

Email: pbelard@iu.edu

Abstract

After a relatively slow policy intervention and scholarly take-up, recent developments

created the urgency for massive efforts to implement and regulate telework in public

organizations. We contribute to this debate through a systematic review of 120 studies

across disciplines. Findings from our analysis reveal a few established antecedents of

telework, including individual characteristics like family responsibilities and expected

productivity, but also organizational aspects like supportive leadership, and contextual

features like natural disasters. Self-reported productivity and work-life balance stand

out as telework’s most widely studied outcomes, although evidence is often conflict-

ing when coming to the effects of telework. We present our results by distinguishing

pre- and post-pandemic findings. Complementing our systematic review, we engage

in a generative exercise by identifying emerging debates on telework in public

bureaucracies. We conclude by indicating future research directions.

Evidence for practice

•Telework adoption is predicted by individual characteristics, such as family

responsibilities and expected productivity; professional and organizational char-

acteristics, like job control and supportive leadership; and contextual inputs,

such as natural disasters, environmental protection efforts, and legal reforms.

•Telework is associated with a decrease in turnover intention and higher job satisfac-

tion, but also consistently appears to be a predictor of professional isolation.

•In order to maintain their capacity to attract skilled workers, public organizations

should be prepared to transition from a monolithic, administrative-focused tele-

work model to more flexible telework configurations that can accommodate the

diverse characteristics and needs of their employees.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last decades, governments worldwide have

explored and often promoted the adoption of telework,

that is, an alternative arrangement whereby employees

work physically away from their usual workplace using

information and communication technologies (ICTs). The

concept of telework has been around since the mid-70s,

when it was first introduced as telecommuting (Nilles

et al., 1976). However, until 2020, its take-up had been rela-

tively slow, with occasional impetus primarily due to policy

interventions.

The pandemic has accelerated tremendously the

scaling-up of telework in governments, turning it into a

mainstream practice, creating the urgency for massive

efforts of design and implementation, as well as for the

formalization of the rules of the game through regulation

and governance (Eurofund, 2022).

Our contribution to such a key priority for govern-

ments worldwide is to map and assess what we know and

do not know about telework in public organizations, offer-

ing a much-needed baseline.

By focusing on telework in the public sector, we fol-

low the lead of the well-established strand of scholarship

Received: 15 February 2023 Revised: 20 September 2023 Accepted: 26 September 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13734

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:1649–1666. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar 1649

that, since the seminal article of Rainey et al. (1976), has

argued and demonstrated that there are distinctive fea-

tures of public organizations that call for caution when

importing managerial theories, principles, and techniques

from the private sector. The differences between the two

sectors should not be overstated. However, there is consen-

susthatatleastinspecificareasthatseemrelevantwhen

exploring telework, such as the formalization of personnel

procedures (Boyne, 2002), and also the use of information

technology (Bozeman & Bretschneider, 1986;Rocheleau&

Wu, 2002) the two sectors diverge remarkably. This point is

corroborated by the research on telework that explicitly

compares public and private organizations, concluding that

sector matters. Studies show, for example, that it accounts

for the extent of the increase in satisfaction (Gastearena-

Balda et al., 2021) and well-being (Boulet & Parent-

Lamarche, 2022; Parent-Lamarche & Boulet, 2021) associ-

ated with telework, and the sector moderates the impact of

personality traits on work alienation due to remote work

(Doberstein & Charbonneau, 2022).

Taken together, these reasons indicate the opportunity

to chart a scholarly territory, that is, telework in public orga-

nization, that does justice to the differences between sec-

tors and addresses the call for a better understanding of the

interplay between contextual features and the way in which

telework is implemented (Hartner-Tiefenthaler et al., 2021;

Taskin & Edwards, 2007), without precluding a fruitful aca-

demic dialogue with sector-neutral reviews on telework

(Gohoungodji et al., 2023; Teiusan & Deaconu, 2022), as well

as flexible work solutions (De Menezes & Kelliher, 2011).

While these reviews offer precious inputs to advance our

research agenda, some of their core assumptions need to

be adjusted to public settings. For example, they lump

together official and non-official employees (Gohoungodji

et al., 2023), or formal and informal working arrangements

(De Menezes & Kelliher, 2011), while it can be argued that

the boundaries between these solutions are more demar-

cated in government, and that the workforce has a predom-

inantly official nature.

Another recent scholarly effort has offered a precious

contribution in this direction, by way of a bibliometric

analysis of studies on smart work in government

(Palumbo et al., 2022). We also detect some emerging

themes in our discussion, but our review is as encompass-

ing as possible and traces the literature on this topic back

to its roots (Callahan, 2010). Therefore, we cast a net wide

enough to include studies based on research conducted

in public organizations, irrespective of the journals where

those studies were published, and without imposing any

temporal constraints. Further, unlike previous studies, we

engaged in the effort to analyze systematically the main

components of telework in public organizations.

In the following section, we account for our method-

ological choices when designing and carrying out our

systematic review aimed at maximizing inclusivity and

transparency (Breslin & Gatrell, 2023). We provide an

overview of this corpus of literature and its main

findings, organized around the main correlates of tele-

work in the public sector, that is, antecedents, effects,

telework as a moderator and mediator, and dynamics.

Next, considering that this unprecedented acceleration

and spread of telework has determined a “sea change”

in the public labor market (United States Office for Per-

sonnel Management, 2022), we discuss our findings

highlighting the pre- and post-pandemic implications

of telework and we engage in a generative exercise

(Pandey et al., 2023) by identifying emerging debates on

telework in public bureaucracies. Finally, we set out our

vision for a research agenda and we conclude.

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

The scope of our systematic review is to study telework in

the context of public organizations to explore relationships

with other individual variables, identify missing pieces of

information on this phenomenon, and, based on these, set

a research agenda. Our systematic review is then broadly

driven by the following research question: how does intro-

ducing telework change public organizations?

We performed and reported our systematic review fol-

lowing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic

Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) (Liberati et al., 2009).

The checklist is reported in Table A1 of the Appendix. We

engaged in a round of consultation with six experts who

met at least two of the following criteria: (i) they had

already studied telework in public organizations; (ii) they

are familiar with HR practices in public organizations;

(iii) they are experts of systematic reviews and meta-

analyses. We submitted the keywords selection to them,

as well as information about the scope of our systematic

review, asking for their validation and advice.

We searched for primary studies on the Web of Sci-

ence, which provides access to multiple databases. In this

way, we included both public administration journals and

journals from other disciplines. Only papers written in

English were considered to be eligible for our systematic

review. Keywords were selected to identify manuscripts

focused on telework in public organizations. In particular,

to be as inclusive as possible in terms of different concep-

tualizations of telework encountered in the literature, we

conducted a preliminary search for articles using not only

“telework,*”but also “remote work,*”“telecommuting,”

“smart work,*”“work from home,”“agile work,*”and

“hybrid work,*”to be found as a topic term in at least

one of the following fields of the article: title, abstract and

keywords. In addition, to narrow down the scope of our

search, we added “public,”“government,”and “agenc*”

to our keywords. The algorithm adopted is the following:

(TS =((telework* OR “remote work*”OR tele-

commuting OR “smart work*”OR “work from

home”OR “agile work*”OR “hybrid work*”)

AND (public OR government OR agenc*) ))

1650 TELEWORK IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS